Optimizing Athletic Performance: Key Training Methods
Split Training Systems
Split training systems involve the fragmentation of effort to achieve a higher training volume and a faster rate, leading to less fatigue. Resistance training should be incorporated throughout an athlete’s life and during the training season, starting with aerobic endurance before progressing to anaerobic work. Progressing to interval training is included within aerobic training, although in some cases it may also have anaerobic characteristics.
Interval Training
An athlete can address two objectives with interval training: reducing time and achieving increasingly longer distances with faster speed work. The scientific basis of fractionated training lies in the improvement received during the “third profitable phase” or recovery period, where true adaptation occurs. The heart muscle, the myocardium, undergoes significant effort. Interval training is an aerobic system that promotes faster adaptation compared to continuous running, though its effects may be less lasting.
Types of Interval Training:
1. Extensive Interval Training
This type is characterized by a high work volume but low intensity.
2. Intensive Interval Training
This type is characterized by a low work volume but very high intensity.
3. Short Interval Method
This method is used for workloads between 15 and 60 seconds. For medium intervals, the duration is 1 to 7 minutes, and for long intervals, 8 to 15 minutes. What specifically characterizes the interval method is the strategically useful pause. After discontinuing effort, there is a relatively rapid decline in heart rate.
Continuous Training Method (Long-Term)
In this method, aerobic training prevails. The factors limiting improved aerobic capacity are: sufficient glycogen reserves and a sufficiently high level of enzyme activity in aerobic metabolism, mainly glycolysis and lipolysis. The continuous training method allows for different effects depending on the volume or intensity of the resistance training load in general. Athletes who train with relatively low work volumes and intensities show a more specific adaptation of fat metabolism and less in carbohydrate metabolism.
The Repetition Method
The repetition method involves re-running a chosen distance at full speed after a complete recovery. This applies to general strength training for speed, as well as general endurance training of short, medium, and long duration. In this training method, all parameters of respiration, circulation, and metabolism return to their resting state due to complete recovery between workloads. During subsequent loads, the body passes back through all stages of metabolic regulation. Thus, the repetition method harmonically favors all metabolic regulation mechanisms that determine performance. This method is very effective, therefore, for improving specific and general endurance, and contributes to the enhancement of cardiovascular, respiratory, and metabolic regulatory mechanisms.