Decreasing the amount of time that you spend exercising is a form of overload training. true false

Emily: Awesome, there’s so much more I want to cover, but we only have so much time. So, I’m curious if you could explain to us what the FITT principle is, FITT and tell us how that can help us recover and feel better in our lives.

Brad: Yeah, so the FITT Principal, it’s just a really simple acronym that is typically used with athletes just to sort of measure their training and so forth. So, fit; FITT stands for Frequency Intensity Time and Type and it’s just a way of sort of monitoring your exercise and monitoring what you’re doing. So, obviously frequency can refer to how often you’re exercising and for a professional athlete that can be on a daily basis, if they’re exercising two, three, four times a day, for us average folks it’s usually measured over the course of a week. So, you might have six sessions a week that you do, or it can even be broken down over like a periodization program. So, again, more for like professional athletes they might look at doing like a six-week training block and they’ll look at the frequency of their exercise throughout that training block intensity pretty self-explanatory this just refers to how hard you’re going to exercise.

So, it’s really important that you include both some easy exercise, maybe some long, easy cardiovascular exercise, and then also mix it up with some more higher intensity type stuff as well. So, again, just looking at your week, you might schedule in say you’ve got six sessions, but you might set a schedule in three or four relatively easiest sessions, and then you might put in one or two, like really hard, tough type sessions. And that’s how you sort of keep a track of the intensity of your exercise time. That’s just how much time you’re spending exercising. So, if you’re a professional athlete, you could be exercising 35 to 40 hours a week. If you’re just an average person, you might exercise anywhere from say five to 10 hours a week.

And lastly, the type of exercise that you do you, are you’re going for a bike ride, are you’re walking along the beach, are you going for a swim? Are you hitting the gym? You know what you’re doing? So, that just gives you sort of an overview. It’s looking at your training from a holistic point of view. Now when it comes to this FITT principle, I feel is most beneficial when it comes to recovery and rehabilitation and so forth. And this is where I use it sort of personally, and with some of the athletes that I work with in regards to sort of measuring their recovery it’s really important that you include some recovery time in your training program. And there’s a couple of reasons for that, but one reason that a lot of people aren’t familiar with, and when I sort of explain this to them, they sort of think, wow, I never looked at it that way.

But what happens is when you start training your body goes through a process whereby firstly it has to adapt to the exercise that you’re doing. So, typically if you haven’t trained for a while and you go to the gym or you start running again, you have that soreness that we all experience for a week or two. But after we get over that your body starts to adapt to the training and starts to getting stronger. The problem is that your muscles adapt much quicker to the training than the rest of your body does. So, your joints, your ligaments, your tendons, the joint capsules, your bones, everything else takes a lot longer to catch up. And so, what happens is you start exercising and you get over that initial sort of soreness, and then you start feeling really good.

Your muscles start feeling stronger, you feel like you can run further, you feel like you can lift more weight and you feel really good. You feel encouraged and you feel sort of encouraged to push and do more and more. The issue is that your muscles have adapted, and your muscles have got stronger. But the tendons that attach those muscles to the bones are still lagging behind the ligaments that provide the structure and the support of your joints. They haven’t developed as much, if you’re doing running your bones haven’t developed that density and that strength that they need to be able to cope with the exercise you’re doing. So, while you may feel like you can do more and more, and your muscles are feeling great, the rest of your body hasn’t caught up yet.

And what typically happens is about two to three months into an exercise program, or after someone started an exercise program, they typically start to get these little aches and pains and little niggles and twinges and knee starts hurting a little bit, or my shoulders a little bit sore. Well, that’s the rest of your body, that hasn’t caught up to your muscles yet. So, it’s really important to schedule these recovery weeks in so that it gives your body a chance for all those other tissues to catch up. And this is where I use the FITT Principle. So, what I do is I look at what an athlete been doing from the point of the FITT Principle. And then what we do is we just cut in half the frequency. So, if they were exercising six times a week, we just cut that down to three times a week, and we cut the time in half.

So, if you were doing six, one-hour sessions, we just do three, half hour sessions for that one week and that’s your recovery week. Now that’s going to give you plenty of exercise so that you continue to maintain all those gains that you’ve achieved, but it gives your body that time and that recovery that it needs to recover and look after itself. And if you schedule one of those recovery weeks in every six or eight weeks, you’ll find that you don’t have these big troughs where you’re always fighting this little here and there or whatever else. So, cut the frequency in half, cut the time in half, you can keep the intensity and the type of exercise the same but just cut that frequency and time in half.

Is decreasing the amount of time that you spend exercising is a form of overload training?

What is meant by overload in exercise?

What is overload quizlet?

Which of the following is an example of the overload principle?