There are two polarized concepts to fitness and your fitness goals known as the law of specificity and the law of adaptation. A successful fitness program of any sort will have to balance these two concepts.

The law of specificity states that your fitness program will need to contour very closely to what your ultimate long-term goal is. In other words, if your goal is to run a marathon, you won’t want to be doing 1 rep maxes with your squats every week. Nor should you ever do that anyway! A runner is going to run and a lifter is going to lift. A football athlete is going to lift heavy, lift moderate and also do power and explosive training because that is what will give the best carryover to the football field. However, if the athlete is spending more than 2 hours in the weight room 5 times per week, and only 1 hour on the field 5 times per week, there may be a misbalance in training there.

There are gray areas to this rule. Now more than ever, the best coaches and trainers in the world are discovering that although we must adhere to the law of specificity, this does not mean we don’t touch on other areas in fitness as they may compliment one another even though they are somewhat polarized, so to speak. For example, even though you may be training to run a marathon, most successful marathon runners may be incorporating 1-2 days of strength training per week coupled with their long-distance runs.

Over time we’ve discovered that strength training while training for long-distance running assists in injury prevention and even the success of becoming a runner in itself. Strength training can help with muscular endurance, as muscle hypertrophy may also assist in how long they can go before they get fatigued, and also may help with a longer stride in creating a greater force production.

“Doing strength work also provokes neuromuscular changes, enhancing your body’s ability to recruit, synchronize, and fire motor units,” Vikash Sharma of Perfect Stride Physical Therapy says.

As most of us know, the core is also essential in any sport, lift or movement which would make sense as to why we would need an ample amount of core work in our strength training regimen to prepare to be a distance runner.

The catch with staying so specific in your training, is understanding the law of adaptation. The law of adaptation is a process our body’s go through in our fitness journey.

In the first phase, our bodies undergo physiological stress due to resistance training and cardiovascular training. The second phase is our body recovering to this stress response to become stronger and more efficient at handling the physiological stress. During this second phase, that may last a few weeks, you will notice that the exercises become easier to perform and your body is more proficient at doing them.

The third phase of adaptation may occur around 3-4 months after the start of your fitness journey. The strength gains may plateau or if weight loss is your goal, you may find that your body is not shedding the pounds and fat like it did initially.

This means that your program and even nutrition will need variation and change. Instead of quitting and letting defeat overwhelm you, adapt instead.

There are a number of ways to place variations in your fitness regimen. The first is to change your strength and cardio program. This may mean doing different exercises and different movements. This could also mean doing them at a different tempo, meaning you can slow down the movement or even speed it up and focus on power. This could mean doing different rep ranges as well as changing different weights. You can likely increase your sets and total amount of volume in your workouts, so long as you are privy to what your body can recover from without being overtrained.

This is known as progressive overload. This means you will need some sort of progression in your regimen to keep seeing progress whether it be in increase in volume, distance or weights being used. In some instances, it may be best to actually DECREASE your workouts for a week or so. This is known as a deload and allows your body to recover from the weeks of hard work put in. This is especially important for intensive programs.

Keeping these two concepts in mind doesn’t mean we need to overcomplicate our fitness. In fact, if you came to the gym every day and did the same thing for 5 years, you would be in better shape than the majority of the American population. It just may not be as fun? To simplify things, you can look up some programs online or talk with a trainer/coach to help you keep variation in your programming while making sure to keep the sights focused on your goals.