Training

It is a common fact that the characteristic feature of living organisms is their ability to respond to external stimulus (excitability), where reaction is some kind of organism’s response to the appearing stimulus. This ability to respond to a stimulus is in fact the only reaction of organism in which the whole process of life takes place. It means that from organism’s perspective the only possible situation is the one in which a given stimulus appears and the organism has to react it or not. The reaction to a stimulus is closely related to its kind, intensity and duration. From the physiological point of view by stimulus we mean every single change in the external environment and also within the internal system which evokes the change of characteristics of the cell walls or their metabolism. To evoke changes in cell walls or their metabolism under the influence of the external changes and internal environment, certain conditions must be met.

Stimulus (the change of environment) has to be:

• Adequate to receptors (cells it influences) – an appropriate quality (type) of stimuli
• Adequately intensive – that is intensive enough to evoke response. Following this perspective we can differentiate threshold stimuli (the lowest number of environmental changes which trigger further changes), above threshold stimuli and below threshold stimuli (which do not trigger any changes).
• Adequately long – that is long enough to be received.

From this point of view every stimulus is a stimulant because it stimulates the organism to a given reaction expressing its adaptation to the change of the external or internal environment and then it performs stimulating function. Whereas, it is the organism’s reaction to the stimulus which performs adapting function in relation to a stimulus. However, adaptation occurs providing the stimulus is systematic so as the organism could adapt to it by means of a permanent change of the structure or function. Each training session constitutes certain stimulus the organism reacts to. The organism’s reaction towards training is strictly subordinate to rules applying to a stimulus, in other words a proper training has to be:

Adequate to the parameter it is meant to develop – if we apply training which will affect the decomposition of the contractible proteins (body building training) then as a result of the adaptation to such stimulus the growth of the muscular mass will be triggered. On the other hand if the organism is exposed to endurance training it adapts to it by means of the improvement of the functioning of the respiratory and circulatory system as well as the increase in vascularisation of the working muscles etc. However, the key issue is that it is not the type of training which develops certain adaptation of the organism but its character (quality) that is the way it stimulates a given organism. It means that in the process of planning of a given training and an athlete should be analysed individually so as to determine the rage of changes which will occur in the process of organism’s adaptation to the training stimulus.

Adequately intensive – if we desire to attain a permanent and focused change of a certain parameter in a given athlete we need to individually tailor the programme for them so that the stimulus triggered would be on the minimum threshold level to the developed parameter.

Adequately long and systematic – adequately long and systematic threshold stimulus will facilitate the improvement of the systems functioning and structure of muscles needed to develop a given parameter.

In coaching practice we distinguish: technical and motoric base training, but for the organism this division is artificial which would rather determine the quality of training, strictly speaking, determining the focus of the training session.

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Training is a process of organism’ adaptation to systematically repeated effort in a form of physical exercises which results in an improvement of effort adaptation and tolerance of greater training loads as well as acquiring and mastering new motor acts understood as a process of muscular and skeletal coordination at the different level of automatisation. This process evokes changes within locomotor, circulatory, respiratory, endocrine and nervous system as well as adaptation changes within many organs where the quality and range of changes strictly depend on the character of training its duration and intensity.