What do you call the principle of training program that refers to the amount of load or resistance to the body?

The principle of specificity states that sports training should be relevant and appropriate to the sport for which the individual is training in order to produce the desired effect. Additionally, training should progress from general conditioning to specific training for the particular skills required in that sport or activity. 

Essentially, specificity training means that you must perform the skill in order to get better at it. It is the principle behind that old saying, "practice makes perfect."

In order to perform most sports and physical activities, you need a base level of fitness. The specificity principle of sports conditioning comes into play when an athlete wishes to excel in a specific sport or activity. Your training must go from highly general—such as lifting weights and cardio—to very specific so it includes performing that exercise or skill. For instance, to be a good cyclist, you must cycle. A runner should train by running, and a swimmer should train by swimming.

In sports that require a wider set of skills, a training program may break down different components. For example, in baseball you would train for batting, catching, throwing, or pitching. In basketball, training would consist of agility and bursts of speed as well as shooting accuracy.

Training mimics the action and skills that will be needed in the game or activity. It may concentrate on any combination of fitness components, such as strength, power, and endurance. For instance, while a marathon runner will train more for endurance and strength, a weightlifter is more concerned with strength and power.

The primary goal of specificity of training is to condition the muscles that will be used in the target activity. Over time, you develop muscle memory for specific actions so you can perform them without having to concentrate on them.

As you train, you are able to master the skills you will need and learn the best form to use. You can also progress to learning variations of those skills, which may be even more useful during a game or activity.

If you are training to run a race, for instance, you will work on your speed and endurance. But you also want to train under conditions that will mimic the race itself. This includes training in the same sort of terrain with hills, pavement, and weather conditions to build up to the distance and pace required.

While you could simply run on a treadmill, that would not prepare you mentally and physically for the varied conditions you will find in a road race.

A well-designed training program does not neglect aspects of fitness that aren't specific to a sport. You still need to maintain overall fitness and balance the development of opposing muscle groups.

If you focus only on drills and skills specific to your sport, you may end up unbalanced. This may inhibit your athletic ability and performance in the long run.

The six principles of sports conditioning are the cornerstone of all other effective training methods. These cover all aspects of a solid foundation of athletic training.

• Individual differences: Everyone is unique, so training must be adapted to the individual.
• Overload: In order to improve your fitness, you need to increase the stress or load the muscles are exposed to.
• Progression: As your fitness level improves, your training should become more difficult and the workload greater.
• Adaptation: Your body's ability to adapt over time to an increase in exercise can dictate your training.
• Use and disuse: To maintain conditioning, you need to keep using your muscles.
• Specificity: Training for a particular athletic activity.

Once put together, the most logical training program involves a periodized approach that cycles the intensity and training objectives. The training must be specific not only to your sport but to your individual abilities. This includes your tolerance to training stress, recoverability, and outside obligations, among others.

It is also important to increase the training loads over time, allowing some workouts to be less intense than others. Training needs to be regular as well. Sessions should be frequent enough to prevent a detraining effect and to force an adaptation to what you may encounter on game or race day.

The best athletic training programs offer a well-rounded schedule that applies to the principles of sports conditioning. The specificity of your training is going to depend on your sport of choice as well as your individual needs. Keep in mind, however, that developing great athletic skills should not be too focused and should include elements that work on your overall fitness.

Verywell Fit uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

1. Hawley JA. Specificity of training adaptation: Time for a rethink?. J Physiol (Lond). 2008;586(1):1-2. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.2007.147397

• Reilly T, Morris T, Whyte G. The specificity of training prescription and physiological assessment: A review. J Sports Sci. 2009;27(6):575-89. doi:10.1080/02640410902729741

• Kenney WL, Wilmore JH, Costill DL, Wilmore JH. Physiology of Sport and Exercise. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics; 2015.

The overload principle is a deceptively simple concept. To make fitness gains you have to overload the body progressively. Lift heavier weights, run longer, workout more days a week, and so on in order to provide enough stress that the body will adapt and get stronger, faster, and more powerful.

As a trainer you surely know what the overload principle is, but do you really understand it? Enough to plan the best program for each client? We’ll run through the basics of overload and provide some important tips for progressively and safely overloading your clients until they hit their goals.

What is the Overload Principle?

The overload principle is one of the seven big laws of fitness and training. Simply put, it says that you have to increase the intensity, duration, type, or time of a workout progressively in order to see adaptations. The adaptations are improvements in endurance, strength, or muscle size.

In other words, when a client first starts working out, from having been previously mostly sedentary, they will see some quick gains. But, as they get fitter, you will need to increase the intensity of their training to continue to see those gains. If they continue lifting the same weights for the same number of sets and reps, week after week, the body will have adjusted to the stress, there will be no more adaptations and they will plateau.

Issues with the Overload Principle

Overloading is necessary to make gains in fitness and athletic performance. However, there are some important issues associated with this principle, both what can happen if you don’t do it at all and if you don’t do it right.

Hitting a Plateau while Ignoring the Overload Principle

The obvious issue with ignoring the overload principle is the failure to make gains. If you continue to do the same workout or train at the same intensity and frequency, you will make gains only to a certain point. After that you are not overloading the muscles and hit a plateau with no further improvements or adaptations.

This happens because our bodies are very good at adapting to stress. Initially for your newbie client, that five-pound weight provides a good amount of stress. The client gets stronger quickly. But over time, the level of stress needed in order to make new adaptations rises so high the five-pound weights just don’t cut it.

Overreaching and Overtraining Stress

On the other hand, if you use the overload principle in the wrong way, say by increasing intensity too quickly, you get into a state of overreaching or overtraining. Overreaching is a short-term problem, a decrease in physical performance that takes days to overcome.

Overtraining is a more sustained period of excessive training stress. It can take weeks to months to recover from this state of decreased performance. Some signs of overtraining you should watch out for include:

• Increased resting heart rate.

• Increased blood pressure.

• Loss of appetite and weight loss.

• Difficulty sleeping.

• Emotional changes or mood swings.

• Fatigue.

• Chronic muscle soreness.

• Extended recovery times.

Strategies for Overloading

There are several ways you can make sure your client is overloading and not hitting a plateau. Essentially these strategies all involve increasing some factor of a workout. You can increase one, two, or more in a way that makes sense for your client’s goals. These different factors together make up what is known as the FITT principle:

• Frequency. Frequency is the number of times your client works out, usually measured per week. Increasing frequency could mean going from one to two lifting sessions per week, for instance.

• Intensity. This is how hard your client is working during a training session. For strength training you can increase intensity by using progressively heavier weights. In aerobic activities, measuring heart rate is a good way to monitor increasing intensity.

• Time. The time spent doing a particular exercise, like lifting or running, can be increased to progress and overload.

• Type. Type refers to the actual, specific exercise your client is doing. You can vary the exact type of strength exercises, for instance, to overload a particular muscle or muscle group. For instance, add leg presses to squats to overload leg muscles.

It’s important to vary the factors that you change for your client. For instance, one day you may focus on increasing intensity by using heavier weights. In the next session try to focus on another strategy, like increasing the time spent on weights.

For aerobic adaptations, for instance for a client who is a runner, work on intensity one day, using heart rate or interval training, and increase time with a long slow run on another day in the same week. Mixing up how you overload the body can help to minimize the risk of hitting a plateau on gains.

Rules for Safe and Gradual Overloading

Overloading should always be progressive and gradual. Increasing intensity, reps, frequency, and other elements of training too quickly is dangerous. It can cause injuries, lead to muscle soreness, and of course cause overtraining. Follow these guidelines when planning overload for your clients to keep it safe and progressive:

• It is essential that progression occurs gradually. You can’t go from five-pound weight bicep curls one week to 20 pounds the next without increasing the risk of injury and overreaching or overtraining. Make a careful plan for how to increase workout factors that is not too abrupt.

• For strength training, work on form before moving on to a bigger weight. A safe way to progress with weights is to start with upping time and frequency before intensity. Once your client has mastered a particular movement with safe, good form, start slowly increasing the weight for more intensity.

• Test your client’s maximums to decide on weight amounts and appropriate increases in intensity.

• It’s also important to keep a log of training sessions and how you are increasing frequency, intensity, time, and type.

• Plan for recovery time. This is when gains happen and it helps avoid overtraining and injury. Recovery can be an active rest day, with a gentle workout like a walk, but it can also involve alternating easy and hard workouts.

• Don’t let your client burnout when training. Working out to collapse or exhaustion is never healthy and is more likely to lead to overtraining.

To learn more about how to determine rest periods between high-intensity sets, check out this post on the ISSA blog.

Applying Periodization

One way to avoid overtraining from overloading is to apply periodization to your client’s workouts. To get results from overloading, you don’t actually want your client to progress linearly. It is not a good idea to simply make every workout harder, faster, or longer than the previous one. There should be more variation, which is the idea of periodization in training.

Periodization is the specific planning of training cycles. It is a necessary way to train to accommodate the overload principle. In order to progress and make gains you have to vary workouts to overload the body. But, you also need to accommodate the GAS (general adaptation syndrome) principle, which says high-intensity training needs to be followed by low-intensity training or rest.

By periodizing training, you can plan for progressive overload with cycles of more intense, frequent, longer workouts and cycles that are lower in intensity for recovery and rest. There are three types of cycles that go into a periodized training plan:

• Macrocycles. The macrocycle is a long period of training, lasting six months to a year. The macrocycle may coincide with a sports season, like summer and fall running races, or culminate in one event, like a fitness competition. Your client will have large, overarching goals for the macrocycle, like running a marathon in a certain time.

• Mesocycles. A macrocycle is divided into three to four mesocycles, lasting a couple of weeks to a month. These cycles can hit specific smaller goals, like running a 10k, then a half marathon. They may focus on specific aspects of training, like strength or hypertrophy for lifting.

• Microcycles. These shorter cycles last just about a week but maybe two weeks. Each microcycle is the detailed workouts you plan for your client, keeping the larger goals and focuses in mind.

Periodization allows you to vary your client’s overall workout and take advantage of overload with appropriate periods of rest or low intensity activities. Changing up the focus of each mesocycle and varying sessions within each microcycle provides enough overload, variation, and recovery time to help meet the overall macrocycle goals.

The overload principle is a crucial, foundational idea in fitness. If you don’t overload the body, you will never see gains in muscle strength, endurance, and size or aerobic fitness. Over-stress the body and you will over-train and see a decline in performance or even get injured.

Finding the right balance is essential for careful and effective progression. And when combined with periodization in a good training plan, you can help your clients overload the right way, making important fitness gains and hitting athletic and performance goals.

If you want to learn more about working with athletes and helping them hit their goals, check out the ISSA’s comprehensive course on Strength and Conditioning.

Click HERE to download this handout and share with your clients!