The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom: How to train to improve at any sport

Autoregulation is a training strategy that is based upon allowing the athlete (or the athlete’s performance) to determine the difficulty of a training session based upon their freshness – this is sometimes called their readiness to train.

GAS based mechanism of adaptation. Similarly, the description of base building has been focussed on higher volume, general training that is performed towards the start of a competitive season.

Pareto’s Principle is applied to business it suggests that a business will generate 80% of its income from 20% of its customers. However, it would not be a viable strategy for a business to divert all of its resources into working with the most profitable 20%. Over time, this 20% would erode – for instance, as customers moved to other suppliers or

training is a necessary pre-requisite for continuing improvements that are driven by the more intense training.

Although the “everything else” of training may not be the direct primary driver of large improvements in performance capability in the short term, the establishment, maintenance and growth of a base of

however in the medium to long term the gains in performance would dry up if employing such an approach.

Pareto’s Principle would seem to imply that an athlete could actually eliminate 80% of the training that they perform and still expect to enjoy most of the improvements in performance capability by just performing the hot sessions.

This caveat is as follows: Pareto’s Principle is highly applicable in the short term, but requires some modification when it is applied in the long term.

Pareto’s Principle – that is the principle that (approximately) 20% of an athlete’s training will account for (approximately) 80% of the improvement in performance capability.