Training Principles Series: Specificity
“Making progress is like driving a car - Progressive overload is what keeps the car moving forward, and Specificity is what steers it in the right direction”
The principle of specificity of training is a foundational principle in exercise science. It emphasizes the fact that the type of training you do will determine the kind of results you get. In this article I’m going to explain the importance of utilizing this principle when planning your training, and provide some examples of how it can be applied.
Training vs Exercising
There are practically a million different ways to exercise, but only so many ways to train effectively. Training and exercising aren’t always the same thing - all training is exercising but not all exercising is training.
What I mean is, exercise is a broad term that includes basically any sort of physical activity that you can do that is challenging in some way or another.
On the other hand, training is a methodical way of using exercises and drills to introduce a very specific kind of stress to the body, in a very specific way, in order to cause a very specific outcome.
So in essence, you can exercise effectively in a million different ways if your goal is to just stay active, but if your goal is more specific - like growing certain muscle tissues, improving your aerobic capacity, getting better and stronger at Olympic lifts, or improving your 100m sprint time - then there are very specific training protocols that you need to follow in order to attain those outcomes. You can’t just exercise for the sake of exercising.
Training Adaptations: How and Why?
To understand this on a deeper level, we need to have a discussion about what training adaptations really are, and how it all works. To avoid getting too deep into all of the nuances of different types of training and the responses they elicit, I’ll paint this idea in broad strokes.
The very essence of training is stress. The word stress has negative connotations, but believe it or not, not all stress is bad. Stress achieved from training is called stimuli - meaning it stimulates changes in the body.
Training is a way of introducing a very specific kind of stress (stimulus) onto the body, and if it’s done repeatedly in a strategic way, and in the right doses, the body is forced to change (or in other words, to adapt). The reason the body changes is because it is constantly striving to maintain homeostasis as a means of survival - which is a fancy way of saying - the body needs to constantly adjust it’s internal environment to maintain specific conditions to keep all of it’s bodily processes working properly, so that you don’t die.
The easiest way to understand this is to consider how your body handles temperature changes. Your body needs to maintain an internal temperature of around 97-99 degrees Fahrenheit to make sure that all of your internal organs and cells function properly, so any time there’s a deviation from that, when you get too hot or too cold, your body has to kick specific processes into gear to regulate your temperature and bring it back to normal. If you get too cold your body will restrict blood flow to the surfaces of the body to re-route it to your internal organs to keep them warm and minimize heat loss, and it will cause you to start shivering since physical activity generates heat. On the other hand, if you get too hot the body will start up other mechanisms to cool you down, like sweating and sending more blood to the surface of the skin to promote heat loss. This is how your body deals with the threat changing temperature has on homeostasis.
The stress of training is a threat to the body’s homeostasis because it radically changes the internal environment, similar to temperature. The body is then forced into having to adjust and go through all sorts of trouble to try and get back to baseline functioning.
So it goes like this: stress is introduced (training) -> the internal environment changes (in response to the training)-> the body is forced to regulate the internal environment, which requires resources and energy -> homeostasis is achieved once again -> you don’t die.
The more you expose the body to the same stress, the better it gets at handling the changes to the internal environment; it gets better at reaching a state of homeostasis faster and more effectively.
Over time, and with repeated exposures, the body will be forced to change itself so that the stress doesn’t keep changing the internal environment to the same degree. It changes itself out of necessity, as a survival mechanism. This is why muscles get bigger and stronger, the heart gets better at pumping blood, the lungs get better at bringing in oxygen and dispelling carbon dioxide, the cells get better at performing all of their processes, and so on and so forth.
If doing 20 biceps curls with a 20lbs dumbbell is really hard, it’ll be quite stressful for the body. But if you do it over and over again for weeks and months, the body will make sure that it is equipped to handle that stimulus better and better, so it becomes less and less of a threat. As a result, you’ll get stronger and better at performing biceps curls, and your arms will look a lot better.
What is Specificity? And why does it matter?
The principle of specificity of training states that if you want to achieve a very specific goal in the gym, you should train specifically for that goal and that goal alone. If you want to become a successful bodybuilder, you don’t want to be training like a marathon runner, and vice versa.
To say that you are working to achieve a certain goal in the gym is just another way of saying that you are training to force the body to make specific adaptations. For example, if you want bigger biceps, then the adaptation you’re chasing is the growth of the muscle fibers in the biceps. The growth of these muscle fibers will require a very specific type of stress, in combination with proper recovery afterward (a proper diet, plenty of sleep, etc).
Since these adaptations require a significant amount of energy and resources, it would make sense to only focus on one goal at a time. And since very specific stimuli are required to cause specific adaptations, they can sometimes be conflicting with other stimuli for other adaptations, especially if you try to expose your body to them concurrently. For example: the kinds of adaptations required to become a really good marathon runner are vastly different than the kinds of adaptations required to be a really good bodybuilder. Therefore, it would make sense that if you wanted to do either one of those things really effectively, you should focus specifically on training for that one thing.
That isn’t to say that other adaptations aside from the main goal won’t be beneficial - which is where ancillary/complimentary training goals come into play. If you’re trying to be a good bodybuilder, having a robust cardiovascular system will be extremely beneficial. You’ll just never be able to push your body to adapt it’s cardiovascular system to the extent that you would if you were running marathons. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still do your cardio though. But when and how do you do your cardio, since that’s a different type of training and a different type of stimulus from what you’re doing to grow your muscle? This leads into the next point - training in phases.
Specificity of Training Phases
Since the body is a master of adapting, if you keep doing the exact same exercises with the same reps, sets, and weight, for long enough, eventually it won’t be a challenge for the body anymore and your progress will come to a halt - you’ll hit a plateau. This is where another training principle, progressive overload, comes into play. Things need to get harder over time so that you can keep forcing the body to have to change and adapt. However, there are upper limits to this. You can only do so much before your body starts to take on more stress than it’s capable of dealing with. For example, if you’re planning out a muscle growth phase, you will need to increase the number of sets you’re doing each week as you move through that phase. But since the body has upper limits to what it can handle, it’ll get to a point where, in order to continue to make progress, you would need to be pushing your training to such extremes that you end up not being able to recover from it, and it starts to becomes detrimental.
This is where the idea of training in phases comes from, and why bodybuilders have the classic “bulking” and “cutting” phases that they go through.
What you want to do is choose a specific amount of time, say 8 or 12 weeks for example, and spend that time focusing intensely on training for one very specific goal. All of your training efforts should be aimed at creating the stimulus the body needs to change in that specific way. Then once you’ve exhausted your body’s adaptive resources, and reached the end of the runway of progression, you would then switch to a new training phase for a bit of time, with a focus on a different goal. The goals you’re switching between should be complimentary to each other.
Examples of Specificity in Training Phases
If your goal is to grow muscle and to look better, here’s one example of how you can utilize different training phases to make the most progress.
Phase 1 - Growth
This phase will spend weeks and months focusing primarily on weight lifting, with volume increasing incrementally as time goes on - which is one of the drivers of muscle growth. You will pair this training phase with a caloric surplus, which is necessary for growth. You will only do as much cardio as is necessary to maintain your current aerobic fitness level, and no more. Once you get to the end of this training phase, you will take a week to maintain where you’re at, and you’ll decrease all of your weights and your volume by 50%, to give your body a bit of a break from the intensity of the training. Then you’ll switch into the next phase.
Phase 2 - Fat loss
This phase will spend time focusing on losing body fat so that the muscle you built in the previous phase can be shown off. And since a calorie surplus is necessary for muscle growth, you’ll inevitably gain a little bit of body fat in the process, which you can then get rid of during this phase. The fat loss phase is also going to serve the purpose of “resetting” the body’s adaptive resources so that you can start off the next muscle growth phase without needing to do as much work to keep stimulating growth. The primary focus during this time will be on developing your aerobic fitness, and you will only do as much weight lifting as necessary to hold on to the muscle you gained in the previous phase. This will be paired with a caloric deficit, which is necessary for fat loss. Once this phase is over, you’ll do another week or two of maintenance, where your calories are brought back to baseline, and then you switch back into a growth phase.
Keep the train moving forward
This is how you keep progressing in your training, without running yourself into the ground or hitting plateaus. I will have another article about progressive overload, which I eluded to a little bit here, which will help tie everything together well. But now you have a great foundation of knowledge to begin to make better decisions in your training programs, so that you can maximize your progress and break through plateaus.
