The Fitness Fundamentals
How to train for your body recomposition goals
Nutrition has been the focus over the past five weeks and you may have implemented some or all of the strategies around tracking intake and setting energy targets, alongside managing hyperpalatable foods, hunger and plateaus.
Training is the focus of the next few weeks, and we will explore training types, set targets and develop a personalised approach to training.
Before we get caught up in the strategy and tactics of training for body recomposition, let’s run through the training fundamentals.
Why training is important for body recomposition
Physical activity impact body composition in several ways including energy expenditure, health and wellbeing, muscular adaptations and performance.
Physical activity significantly contributes to energy expenditure and plays an important role in managing energy balance. High energy expenditure places less reliance on reducing energy intake from foods and fluids while managing energy balance, which promotes adherence for many people.
Physical activity is also important for health and wellbeing. It enhances mood, helps show progress and validates the body recomposition strategy in the initial stages. Physical activity also benefits the prevention and management of various chronic health conditions.
Physical activity helps drive muscular changes to body composition. This is the critical difference between a diet-only weight loss strategy compared to and a training and nutrition-led body recomposition strategy. Physical activity provides stimulus for muscular adaptations and development. If we want to add muscle, we must do physical activity that targets these areas.
Physical activity also improves strength, fitness and mobility which are positive feedback on the strategy. These help increase capacity and allow people to complete physical goals that aren’t related to body composition such as running a marathon, doing a certain amount of push ups or moving into the advanced pilates class.
Types of training
There are four broad types of physical activity - strength, cardio, mobility and others. Each of these can be trained for specific adaptions such as strength, fitness and mobility.
Resistance
Resistance training involves challenging the muscles with load, typically in the form of free and machine weights. This training increases the muscle's capacity to apply force (i.e. strength) and can also increase the size of the muscles (hypertrophy).
Cardiovascular
Cardiovascular training involves challenging the body with demands on the cardiovascular system (heart and lungs) through the intensity or duration of physical activity. This training increases the cardiovascular system's capacity to meet demand (i.e. speed) or maintain output (endurance).
Mobility
Mobility training involves challenging the musculoskeletal systems' range of motion through a combination of strength and flexibility. This training increases the body’s range of motion and ability to produce force.
Other
Other physical activities can include sports, games or other activities that increase heart rate. They may include training parameters but are generally not specific to body recomposition goals, i.e. playing tennis increases energy expenditure, but it could be replaced with any other activity.
Progressive overload - the key to improved strength, fitness and mobility
What differentiates ‘training’ from ‘physical activity’ or ‘exercise’ is the intent. Training is physical activity to improve strength, fitness and mobility whereas physical activity or exercise does not necessarily pursue these progressions.
As discussed last week during the plateau article, our body adapts to stimuli by becoming stronger, fitter or more mobile. Once that adaptation is made, a new stimulus must be applied to drive further adaptation.
These stimuli are varied through training frequency, intensity, duration and type.
Frequency
The frequency of training can be increased. This has the benefit of increasing the number of stimuli and can assist in speeding adaptation. Instead of training the full body once per week, you might break it up into smaller segments and train different body parts multiple times each week.
Higher frequency supports greater intensity and typically comes with reduced duration.
Intensity
Intensity is important for creating a stimulus for adaptation. Generally speaking, we must push ourselves to near capacity to drive adaption. If we keep to our limits, no adaptation is required.
Pushing to near limits can be uncomfortable and usually shows through muscular or cardiovascular challenges such as discomfort in the lungs and muscles.
Higher intensity typically leads to reduced duration.
Duration
The duration of physical activity is important for endurance. If we want to be able to do something for longer, we must structure our training to include increased duration to drive these adaptations.
Longer duration typically leads to reduced intensity.
Type
Adaptations are specific to the activity that we perform. While running and cycling can increase cardiovascular fitness, running isn’t the best way to prepare for a cycling event. The local muscular adaptations and load-bearing requirements are unique to each type of activity that we do.
Some activities have a high carry-over to others, such as running and walking. While the cardiovascular benefits from cycling will carry over to running, the muscular requirements are different, i.e. different movement patterns and load requirements, so what will often happen is someone can ride for two hours at a decent pace but fatigue from 30-minutes of running because their calves fatigue much quicker than their glutes, quads and hamstrings.
The type of training can impact frequency and duration. Doing different types of training allows you to train more frequently or for longer, as the fatigue from one training type has less impact on others. For example, you could run in the morning and do weights in the evening 5x a week without detracting from each other. However, running twice per day 5x a week is likely to lead to overtraining.
Summary
Understanding the types of physical activity and progressive overload requirements will be useful as we explore training strategies over the coming editions. Next week, we are looking at developing strategies to hit your physical activity targets.
Q&A
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Thanks for your well written concise explanations. I look forward to more reading!