Sports Fitness Training

Of course, the majority of people who train with weights are never going to compete (just as most people who play tennis or golf don’t expect to enter Wimbledon or the Masters Invitational). But whether you bodybuild with the aim of sculpting a competition physique or are training to improve your performance at sports, to be healthy and fit, to look and feel better, or to rehabilitate an injury, all muscle building done correctly depends for its results on the same basic exercise principle, that of progressive-resistance training.Progressive-resistance training works because the body is designed to adapt and grow stronger in response to greater amounts of stress than it is used to. If you are used to running two miles a day, then running five miles puts more demand on your muscles and the ability of your cardiovascular system to supply enough oxygen and nutrients to keep the muscles functioning under the stress of this greater demand. You may be in shape to run two miles, but you have to get in better shape to run five miles. Improving your conditioning in this case is a matter of increasing how far you run and giving the body time to change and adapt to this increase.

When it comes to muscle building the same principle applies. The muscles are adapted to dealing with a certain level of demand, specifically to a certain amount of weight in your exercises lifted with a certain degree of intensity. When you increase the amount of weight and/or intensity, your muscles have to become bigger and stronger to deal with it. Once they have adapted to the new level of demand, you increase the amount of weight and/or intensity in your workouts so that they will continue to get bigger and stronger. In other words, you progressively increase the demands you make on your muscles over time.

But not every kind of training you do with weights is going to end up creating a bodybuilding physique. You have to do the right kind of exercises, using the right techniques, so that you send a specific message to the nervous system that tells the body what kind of adaptation you wish to achieve. This is called specificity of training and it is why learning how to train the right way is so important.

Bodybuilding is based on that same principle. The body doesn’t

know what you think you are telling it to do, it only registers and adapts to the specific instructions you are giving it by the way you are working out. You may feel you are building muscle, you can be working hard, sweating, getting tired and sore, but unless you are sending the right code to the body, you are going to be disappointed in your results. And the code in this case is a correct understanding of the principles of progressive-resistance training.